A Part of Something Special

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Read about Dave Zdyrko's story regarding what he had to do to buy a PS2 on the day of its launch.

By IGN Staff

In order to fully describe what I went through to get a North American PlayStation 2, you actually have to go back to this weekend when I began finishing up my reviews for the system's launch titles that were being reviewed by myself. After having just gotten back from Detroit to watch the Mike Tyson fight that capped off a long week that included five different airplane flights, a six hour road trip from LA to San Francisco, three different industry-related parties that kept me up late and completely intoxicated, I slept in on Sunday and didn't wake up until around 1:00 PM.

After getting out of bed and cleaned up, I started working on my reviews for the 10 launch games that were my responsibility. Because I hadn't yet played enough of three of the games, I only was able to work on the other seven and spent all night and part of early Monday morning finishing them off. Monday, I spent playing the three remaining games that I had left, which were X-Squad, Moto GP, and Summoner. X-Squad and Moto GP together only took about five hours to completely play through and beat and the writing of the reviews only took about another one to two hours.

However, the same couldn't be said of Summoner. Because of the depth of the game and the desire to try and beat all games before I review them, the Summoner review wasn't going to be easy. So, sometime beginning early Monday afternoon, my life was dedicated completely to playing through Summoner so it could be reviewed with our second batch of PS2 launch games on Tuesday. However, because of the length of the game and the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day, the Summoner review wasn't up on time Tuesday night and I had to continue working on it through the night and didn't finish it off until around 5:00 AM on Wednesday morning.

So, here I was going on 54 hours without any sleep, but finally finished with my PlayStation 2 game reviews. It was time to sleep, right? No. Sleep was going to have to wait because the Metreon had announced that it would allow people to start lining up to buy PS2s at 8 AM on Wednesday morning, so it was time for me to start getting ready and jump on the MUNI to get into the city. After riding the train, where I actually passed out for about 15 minutes before David Smith had to wake me up to get off at our stop, I ended up in line at the Metreon.

Much to our surprise, there had been people already waiting, as there were a few people that made it there earlier in the morning and others that had begun waiting late last night. Slightly peeved by the fact that the Metreon employees had told us that nobody would be allowed to wait until 8 AM, which kept us from coming earlier, we got in line about 30 or 40 people away from the front and began our wait fairly confident that a North American PS2 was in our future.

For the most part, the wait was pretty uneventful. The highlights of the afternoon included Jeremy Conrad falling on his face while trying to get over the police barricade in order to take a bathroom break, David Smith buying us a set of four fold-out chairs, and the realization that Sony had really planned this thing well. This was easily the best line that I've ever had to wait in -- it was managed well, we were given food throughout the day and Sony even set up entertainment in the form of jugglers and music. Sony showed that it truly respects its fans by the amount of effort that it put into making sure that everyone was as comfortable as possible, and I, for one, really appreciated it. Around 9 PM, Sony began giving out these wristbands to the people in line, which signified that they were guaranteed a PlayStation 2. Even though we were already sure that we were definitely going to get a system, this really sealed it for us and made each of us feel a bit more chipper.

The only complaint that I had about the entire wait was that around 11 PM, about an hour away from the official east coast launch of the PS2, the line management began to break down a bit. Partly because a lack of security and possibly because of the stirred up emotions that were the cause of the worst comedic effort that I've ever witnessed, rampant cutting ensued and instead of being between 30th and 40th in line, I was quickly somewhere in the 70s. Tensions were a bit high and Jeremy Conrad was actually so infuriated about the goings on that he actually threatened to smack someone "WWF style" with his chair if he didn't shut his ass up. Nothing happened -- videogame geeks aren't too violent despite what the mainstream press might think.

Just before 1:00 AM on Thursday, October 26, 2000, I finally got up to the register with a PS2 in my hands. I bought the PlayStation 2, an 8 MB memory card and paid a grand total of $ 358.37 (includes sales tax). With PS2 in hand, I headed home and slept in a bed for the first time since 1 PM on Sunday afternoon -- over 80 straight hours without any significant amount of sleep.

So, was it really worth all of that just to get a PlayStation 2? Maybe, maybe not. I've already played all the launch games and would easily be able to play anything I wanted to at work and could take our office PS2s home any time I wanted to, so if you look at it from that standpoint, there was really no need for me to bend over backwards to get a system. However, what I did wasn't really about just getting a PS2, it was more about experiencing and being a part of something special. Regardless of what you think about the PS2 and how you think it'll fare against GameCube and Xbox, the simple fact is that the launch of PlayStation 2 here in the States is the biggest gaming event of the year and is unarguably the biggest console launch that these shores have ever seen. The launches of the Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, SNES, 32X, Genesis, NES, Master System and every other console released before today simply paled in comparison. This was the biggest launch in history and there wasn't a better place to be than at the Metreon in San Francisco to buy an American PlayStation 2 at Sony's official PlayStation store.